Just birds

I left the coffee shop by the back door in the middle of the afternoon. The winter sun was already low in the sky. As I turned up the alley, I was thinking about the barista who would very soon be moving on to another job.

And then I saw a hawk swoop down in front of me. I’m only guessing that it might have been a young Red-tailed hawk. It was quite small. The hawk dropped rapidly from a wire and glided low ahead of me through the artificial canyon of brick buildings on either side of the rough asphalt and dark puddles of the alley. Then the hawk glided on past 9^th street and into the alleyway on the far side, swooping suddenly back up and alighting on one of the many wires that crisscross the alley.

I walked along the alley at my own pace. I eventually approached the place where the hawk was resting, swiveling its head as it looked around. Perhaps it was looking for mice down among the garbage bins. Whatever else the hawk might have been doing, it was being a hawk. I peered up at the hawk. I saw white and gray speckled feathers on its back. A grayish tail, I thought. Then the hawk apparently decided that I was too close and it swooped down again, gliding low with hardly a wing beat through the alley , and then, eventually swooping back up, this time coming to rest on top of a telephone pole.

As I walked forward again, I saw a man with two young children walking towards me. As they got closer, I realized that I knew the kids from chess club at New York  Elementary School. I called out to them and point towards the hawk. The young boy spotted the hawk right away, but his sister couldn’t see it. I explained just which telephone pole the hawk was sitting on and then she saw it, too. They looked at the hawk for just a few moments, and then, with their father, they went in through the back door of one of the shops. It was just a hawk, after all.

I walked on towards the hawk, looking around from its perch. I got my device camera out of my pocket to try to take a photo. But again, I got too close and the hawk flew down ahead of me, this time landing in the branches of a tree behind Wheatfields bakery. And then, once more, as I approached, the hawk flew off, this time up and over the building. I walked around the building, looking for the hawk, but I couldn’t see it anywhere.

I thought again about Abbi, the barista I had just left at Aimee’s. She had been closing up for the afternoon. I wished she could have seen the hawk. I wished she could have been standing next to me as I pointed ahead to where the hawk was resting, looking around, being a beautiful, breathtaking hawk, flying with amazing grace through the grimy alleyways of Downtown Lawrence. But Oliver had seen it. And Isabella.

But still, it was just a hawk.

I dropped a few things off at the public library and headed for the river. There were pigeons resting on the cable over the dam. Then they took off and were flying around and around  as pigeons will, their wings all catching the lowering sun at the same time as they all turned together. And there were seagulls circling over the river as well, dipping down to the surface of the river from time to time. Fishing. Being seagulls.

There were maybe seven or ten Canada geese swimming just below Bowersock North, the hydroelectric plant. They swam off as I slid down a rough gravel path toward the water’s edge. The swimming geese caught a swift current that ran between two limestone islands and sped away. I saw a Great Blue heron just standing on the edge of one of the low islands of limestone boulders across from where I stood. Herons can just stand where they stand for longer than I can watch. Sometimes I will walk away down the levee trail and then the heron is still standing where I left it when I come back. A heron being a heron.

I climbed back up the levee and walked downstream for a short way. Many more geese were resting below the levee along the edge of the river, but I decided against clambering down the limestone boulders to get closer to them.

I turned back up the levee.

As I crossed the Kaw River Bridge, I could see two bald eagles ahead of me, sitting in the tree where eagles often perch in winter, just beyond the outwash of Bowersock South. And I saw a woman I knew approaching me on the bridge. She waved, and then, when we got close to each other, we stopped to talk a little about the birds. She pointed to bird sitting on a rock in the middle of the river. It might have been a heron, but I couldn’t tell from that distance.

They were just birds, after all.

We parted and I walked around to the promenade of what used to be the Riverfront Mall to get a better look at the eagles. When I got there, I saw two young women with cameras walking towards me. Just I had gotten too close to the eagles in that area the day before, they, too, had apparently gotten to the point where the eagles resting in the tree had then flown off downstream.

I hung back as they walked on towards another eagle resting in a tree farther down the promenade. They crept closer. One woman focusing the long lens of her camera. The other taking pictures with her device camera. The eagle looked to me like a juvenile. When the young eagle had flown away, I went up to the young women and told them about the eagles I had seen the morning before. I, along with some friends, had seen as many as 13 eagles at one time just off the bridge by Bowersock South. I explained how it was a favorite spot for eagles to fish when the river was frozen up above the dam. Amazingly, it was almost twice as many eagles as I had ever seen at one time before. The previous day I had seen eagles watching from the trees. And eagles swooping down to the surface of the water, talons extended. And eagles just circling around over the river, wings outstretched. Sometimes an eagle had flown astonishingly close to where we stood on the bridge. Very large, powerful, graceful, magnificent birds. And when we, too, had also gotten too close to the eagles as we had walked around to the promenade for a closer look, the eagles had all gradually flown off farther downstream. But we had gotten our closer look at some of the eagles.

I told my story to the young women on the promenade. They were glad for the information and I hoped they would see numbers of eagles for themselves some morning from the bridge as I had. The juvenile eagle and a mature bald eagle flew by, at some distance away, over the river a couple of times as I looked out from the promenade.

I finally turned to head for home along the railroad tracks, eventually connecting to the Burroughs Creek Trail. To my eyes, the tangled grasses and the small frozen meandering creek was quite beautiful. But it was just a wide drainage area, I suppose. The sun had already set just behind the horizon of bare winter branches as I neared home.

It was just a sunset. But I wished Abbi could have seen it the way it looked to me. In those moments, I saw before me an urban wetland in the shadows of dusk, and out ahead of me, wisps of clouds catching the colors of the sun in a darkening blue sky.

And I wished she had seen the hawk.